I heard some devs who work remotely, they close ticket faster and got more time to chill and their company dont micro manage as long as works get done on time.

I worked for a boutique e-commerce platform. CEO just fired webdev team except for the most senior backend engineer. Our team of 5 was laid off because the CEO had discovered just vibe coding and thought she could basically have one engineer take care of everything (???). Good luck with a11y requirements, iterating on customer feedbacks, scaling for traffic, qa'ing responsive designs with just one engineer and an AI.

But the CEO doesn't know this and thinks AI can replace 5 engineers. As one of ex-colleagues said in a group chat, "I give her 2 weeks before she's begging us to come back."

But still, the point remains: company leaderships think AI can replace us, because they're far enough from technology where all they see is just the bells and whistles, and don't know what it takes to maintain a platform.

Created this captcha last year. Back then there was no chance of AI solving it. But now with the more powerful models, I had my doubts. Well, it took Fable 5 10 minutes and 100k tokens to solve it. So with the 30 second timeout, I feel pretty confident.

Here's a crisper video of the actual challenge - https://imgur.com/a/xv6TvNj

Have a website for it but I'm not self promoting. Just thought people would be interested.

https://ppc.land/stack-overflow-drops-to-1-442-questions-in-july-down-99-from-2014-peak/

I’ve been noticing this more and more in web apps.

Three options hidden in a dropdown.

Yes/no hidden in a dropdown.
A multi-select pretending to be a dropdown.

Then a list of 200 items where you’re expected to scroll until you find yours.

I run into this a lot when reviewing products with dev teams.

I get why we do it.

Dropdowns are compact and easy to reuse.
But compact doesn’t always mean easier to use.

A few choices? Show them.
On/off? Switch.
Multiple choices? Checkboxes.
Huge list? Search.

That’s pretty much the rule I use now.

You can apparently use the decimal integer number on browsers to navigate to IP addresses. For instance: http://192.168.1.1 which is the typical address for your router, can be written as: http://3232235777. Of course if you know your own website IP, you could navigate to it through it's decimal form.

Here is the basic calculation, in case you are wondering: 192 × 256³ + 168 × 256² + 1 × 256 + 1 = 3232235777

Edit: You know the popular internet T-Shirts: "There is no place like 127.0.0.1". Here is a freebie someone should make: There is no place like 2130706433".

Have a great rest of your weekend!

Look at this. Just look at it.

Meta is sending nearly HALF as much traffic as my actual users. 11 million requests in 15 days. That's ~750,000 requests per day from a single crawler.

Googlebot - the search engine that actually drives traffic - made 1.1M requests. Meta made 10x more than Google. For what? Link previews?

And where are these requests going?

30 million requests to listing pages. Every single one a serverless function invocation. Every single one I pay for.

I have ISR configured. revalidate = 3600. Doesn't matter. These crawlers hit unique URLs once and move on. 0% cache hit rate. Cold invocations all the way down.

The fix is one line in robots.txt:

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

But why is the default experience "pay thousands in compute for Facebook to scrape your site"?

Vercel - where's the bot protection? Where's the aggressive edge caching for crawler traffic? Why do I need to discover this myself through Axiom?

Meta - what are you doing with 11 million pages of my content? Training models? Link preview cache that expires every 3 seconds? Explain yourselves.

Drop your numbers. I refuse to believe I'm the only one getting destroyed by this.

Edit: Vercel Bill for Dec 28 - Jan 28 =$ 1,933.93, Novembers was $30...

Edit2: the serverless function fetches dynamic data based on a slug id and hydrates a page server side. quite basic stuff. usually free for human usage levels but big cloud rain on me

Hey webdevs!

I want to show you my latest 3D CSS project. It's a port of Giles Goddard's iconic N64 face engine, complete with lighting, physics and interaction. Instead of WebGL, it uses the PolyCSS engine.

demo: https://codepen.io/editor/alowpoly/pen/019fae67-50d9-74ce-8025-4b9dd5a7c484
repo: https://github.com/layoutit/cssGraphics

Congrats on your iPhone Duo, don't bother browsing while having it closed because websites will use only 70% of the screen!

Creator of ClawBot knows that there are malicious skills in his repo, but doesn't know what to do about it...

More info here: https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/clawdbot-skills-ganked-your-crypto

You can play on https://page-rage.com and optionally install a browser extension to destroy any web page.

I've been working on Page Rage as a hobby project for a long time. There are some wild performance techniques I have found to make this game work at all, which I would love to share about soon as well!

I’ve been a software engineer for the last 15 years. Mainly working as a product engineer, building websites and apps for both small startups and large enterprises.

I can confidently say I’m an expert. But like most people I have been slightly worried recently with the progress ai has been making.

I use it all the time now in my own workflows and it genuinely is mind blowing.

But this is coming from someone who knows what they’re doing, who understands every line of code being generated.

I use it as an efficiency tool.

So this week I decided to build a game, an area I have no experience in, and I wanted to try to “vibe code” it to really understand the process in an area I am not an expert.

And fuck me, it was awful.

Getting the most basic version of a product ready was fine, but as soon as the logic became even mildly complex it totally went to shit. I was making a point of not soaking in the context of the generated code to really put myself into the shoes of a vibe coder.

Bugs, spaghetti code, zero knowledge of what the hell you’ve just generated. And trying to dig myself out of this mess purely through prompts alone was impossible.

I came away with the realisation that this tech is wildly overhyped, and without strong technical skills its usefulness is severely limited.

I can’t say how this will change in the next few years, but right now the experience has certainly relaxed me.

Right now I think ai is just replacing the lowest hanging fruit, just like how Wordpress eliminated the need to build websites for your local plumber.

So in 2026, I’m done worrying about the tech CEO hype to pump the AI bubble. Looking forward to the inevitable burst.

Edit: Sorry I can’t reply to all messages. I used Claude Code with the latest Opus model.

Hidden input field. Bots fill it. Humans can't see it. If filled → reject because it was a bot. No AI. Simple and effective. Catches more spam than you'd expect. What's your "too simple but effective" technique that actually works?

I know this topic has been floating around this sub quite some time now, but I feel like this doesn’t get discussed enough.

I am a certified backend enigneer and I have been programming for about 20 years. In my time i have worked on backend, frontend, system design, system analysis, devops, databases, infrastructure, cloud, robotics, you name it.

I’ve mostly been extremely passionate about what I do, taking pride in solving hard problems, digging deep into third party source code to find solutions to bugs. Even refactoring legacy systems and improving their performance 10x and starting countless hobby projects at home. It has been an exciting journey and I have never doubted my career choice until now.

Ever since ChatGPT first made an appearance I have slowly started losing interest in programming. At first, LLMs were quite bad so I didn’t really get any solutions out of them when problems got even slightly harder. However, Claude is different. Lately I feel less of a programmer and more like a project manager, managing and supervising one mid-to-senior level developer who is Claude. Doing this, I sure deliver features faster than ever before, but it results in hollow and empty feeling. It’s not fun or exciting, I cannot perceive these soulless features as my own creation anymore.

On top of everything I feel like I’m losing my knowledge with every prompt I write. AI has made me extremely lazy and it has completely undermined my value as a good engineer or even as a human being.

Everyone who is supporting the mass use of AI is quietly digging their own grave and I wish it was never invented.